Friday, May 21, 2010

SCOOBY TREATS

Back in 2003 I was hired to work on the 9th incarnation of the Scooby-doo tv series entitled, 'What's New, Scooby-Doo?'. At this time I was fortunate to meet Iwo Takamoto (Ap.29, 1925 – Jan.8, 2007), the legendary animation designer and creator of the original Scooby-doo characters. He had an office at Warner bros Animation Studio while we were in production.

Around the time we wrapped up the 13 "What's New.." episodes, I pitched an idea of updating the Scooby-Doo designs for a new series, to Scooby producer Marge Dean. In 2004, while I was working on 'Duck Dodgersin the 24½th Century' @ WB, I had an opportunity to develop a couple of new design concepts for our 'New Look' Scooby-doo series pitch .

The designs above and below are some of the things I developed.

The color rendering of my BG design was by Steve Nicodemus

Well as these studio things go, we pitched the "new look" Scooby-Doo show in 2004 to the folks at WB Merchandise. A few design changes were requested, as shown by the Scooby design below.

However WB had another Scooby series in mind 'Shaggy & Scooby-Doo Get a Clue!'. But alas this is not the end of the story.

Luckily, in 2009 Spike Brandt & Tony Cervone, producers at Warner Bros, remembered my "New Look" Scooby designs. They were putting together a new line of Scooby-doo DVD's and chose to use my designs for their opening title sequence.

These are really attractive takes on this group. Well done! Maybe something will prevail to make the studio use them more extensively at some point--in any case, a real improvement over the originals...

At the moment WB already has 2 different, but slightly similar, Scooby productions in the pipeline. Dan Haskett has done an amazing job continuing Takamoto's original designs for the 2010 DVD collection. The other is a new TV series 'Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated'.

From my experience, nothing ever prevails to make a studio do anything, that's just not the way business is handled.

@ j.etienne Personally I think it's just a different version of the original designs, not necessarily a better version. Iwo's Scooby characters have been around for over 40 yrs, that says a lot for the success of the show and his work.

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